PC Game Review Magic Match Adventures

The adorable (c’mon admit it!) imps return for their third game, Magic Match Adventures. You might know ‘em from Magic Match and Magic Match: The Genie’s Journey. Peak into the imps’ lives in the land of Arcania where they enjoy working and playing until something evil trips them up. They need our help in restoring order.

Travel and learn the stories of the kingdoms of Arcania consisting of water, Earth, air, and fire. Reading the stories, however, is difficult because of the text formatting. Whether you’re into stories or the text bugs you, just skip the story and head straight to the Magic Realm.

There in the Magic Realm is the match three game for collecting red potion to fix anything the evil wizard does. We also gather mana for using power ups. After collecting enough red potion, return to the scene where evil cast a spell and see the spell in action. The imps reward you with bonuses to help you in your adventures in defeating the darkest evil.

The match three game grid has at least four different elements and your goal is to destroy the minimum for each element. One calls for 60, another for 40, and two for 25. As you progress, you deal with more elements.

Cradle of Persia players will recognize some similarities in Magic Match Adventures especially in how the elements move. If you make a match from left to right, the entire row or column moves from left to right. You also deal with frozen, locked, and double locked pieces in the form of rocks and volcanoes. Coins, potions, and power ups also count as an element.

Tiles appear in green, blue, and beige colors. Destroying all of them doesn’t mean anything in this game. Instead, you want to grab as many as you can of blue and green, which contain mana for increase blue and green potions. Half of the spells use the green mana and the other half use blue. Mana points are for the eight spells, which vary in the number of points needed to use the spell.

Figuring out what each spell / power up does takes experimenting. Plus, only a handful are worth the effort while you want to save points for strategic reasons.

With every kingdom comes a new evil wizard and a Dark-O-Meter counter. The counter shows the number of evil spells needed to stop and duel the evil wizard in a different kind of game.

The duel involves you and the evil wizard taking turns creating matches to get the required elements. The first one to clear all of the elements first wins. Frozen tiles and other barriers don’t appear during the duel, however, evil wizard puts up a few to slow you down.

By the time you figure out the game and its rules, it’s near the end of the adventure. Magic Match Adventureshas 33 levels and doesn’t take long to play compared to the average game. Since it doesn’t have other game modes, players won’t likely want to keep replaying the game except to try to earn all the trophies. This one could use an arcade mode since it has the right elements.

I’d also love to see more interaction with the imps. Right now, they interact a little bit — the drummer will beat the drum when you click him, for example. Nonetheless, Magic Match Adventures provides an adventure worth traveling along with a few new tricks for match three games.

PC Game Review Big City Adventures: Sydney, Australia

Leave your heart in San Francisco and head to Sydney, Australia in the sequel to the successful Big City Adventure: San Francisco. Instead of cable cars and Alcatraz, visit and find hidden objects in Hyde Park, the famous opera house and bridge, Circular Quay, and the Domain. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia captures the experience of the original plus adds new features.

In this hidden object game, players seek items shown in the list of things find in a Sydney locale before time runs out. After finding all items, players receive a memento and a postcard with facts related to Australia, its past, and its present. If timed mode is too rushed for you, play relaxed mode and don’t worry about the clock.

A nice improvement lets you read any received postcard. Sometimes I didn’t feel like reading postcards and just wanted to play — so I skipped through them knowing I could go back and read them anytime.

Hidden object games often re-use the same scenes. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia comes with 25 unique scenes. Memorizing the location of objects won’t do much good in this one — a good thing. Objects often don’t show up in the same places you’ve seen before making it harder to find them each time you counter.

The game progresses from easy to hard at a steady pace. Experienced players may not feel challenged by the clock or finding objects for half the game, but the game will grow more challenging. Don’t let the game fool you — it will get you later.

Mini-games arrive after finding all the hidden items in the world of wide-brimmed hats, kangaroos, and tribal masks. Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia contains three games from the original: Match three, jigsaw puzzle, and a memory game. The three new games include the dull Whac-a-mole rip-off called Bop-a-Croc, the so-so Pelican/Turtle Challenge for finding matching pairs of the animals’ poses, and the best one, Mahjong Titles. While you need to find matching tiles like in the other mini-games, your goal isn’t to clear the tiles — but to find the two gold stars to complete the game.

Big City Adventure: San Francisco tokens and “Quick Find Bonuses” return in this sequel. Hidden tokens appear in every scene to award players with hints, points, and adding clock time.

Like the original, this one lets you know visually when you click an invalid item. But it also misses a valid click on occasion and doesn’t like you quickly clicking multiple valid objects in a row. It needs to focus on taking one item away before the next one.

Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia leaves little room for flexibility in moving around. The game starts with traveling to a spot for finding hidden objects, playing a mini-game to find out the next destination, and repeat. It may bore some while others will appreciate not figuring out what to do next.

The music and graphics remain sharp as the original. However, the characters need improving. I thought they were corny looking in the original and they still look the same in this one with two new friends — a koala and a wallaby. With beautiful scenes, it’s surprising the characters don’t look more natural.

Players will enjoy mucking around in Big City Adventure: Sydney, Australia and exploring Australia’s vibrant locales. No doubt, this will leave you guessing the next destination as you’ll most likely want to keep traveling.

PC Game Review Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper

“Science fair.” Those two words conjure up different memories for most of us. I did one project in 11th grade as a requirement for Biology II. What do I know? The Audubon Society awarded my deforestation project an honorable mention. Nowadays, the projects kids do just blow us judges away. They make projects from my high school years look like pre-school projects.

Where am I going with this? Crosswords meet science fair and Peanuts look-alike characters in Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper! I’m not shouting — it’s the game title. Although the game deserves a shout of excitement as it falls neither in the hidden game nor time management game genre. So what makes this crossword game different? Strong story, loveable graphics and characters, original power ups, and a Hangman slash Wheel of Fortune style mini-game.

Friends work together to create a word machine for the science fair project. Somehow a thief breaks their project and runs away with the their machine and its parts. The kids chase the thief who drops parts around town passing playgrounds, parks, the beach. The gang creates words to collect all of the the parts in every stage.

In each stage, the kids engage in a battle of wits against the the thief and enemies. The kids take turns with the first one playing for 10 stages, the second for eight, and so on. Every kid has a specialty to give him super powers in fighting the enemy — without fists, of course. Enemies try to stop the gang such as the dog that picks up and moves parts, a duck that eats things, a bully who can break letters.

Create words with at least three letters from the nine letters shown on top of the Scrabble-like grid. Parts rest on different squares of the grid and enemies try to block your way. When you enter a word, a bubble appears with its definition.

Power ups and combos help create words when you’re stuck, jump to a further away square, get a joker, electrify tiles. Even with all of this support, don’t think this makes for an easy game. Besides, it makes a great game for families to play together even with pre-schoolers.

Two mini-games change the pace that fit with the story. Upon spotting the thief, the kids a game where they race to pick up more parts than the thief to win the stage. Before trading kids, the currently on-call kid plays “The Challenge,” a Hangman type of mini-game. The winner gets a page of the machine plans. Just like Hangman, a blank word with a couple of letters filled in appears along with the word’s definition for a clue. Normal game mode uses harder words and clues, but other than that — there’s little difference between Easy and Normal modes.

Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper! comes with 42 stages in adventure mode. Quick game mode comes with five games where you can play with three of the five kids. These last longer since they contend with more parts and challenges. I’d like to see a game mode without the adventure that lets you pick which kid you want to play. Supposedly, more levels are available on the Internet, but nothing shows up on the referenced Web site.

The game begins with a tutorial and that’s it. It needs help instructions along with details of the kids’ names and background. Nonetheless, we get to know the kids and their personalities whenever we play them in the game. Despite the little foibles, Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper! with its good music and charm will entertain families and puzzle fans.